RECOMMENDED

“The Unreasoning Mask: New Revelations in Figurative Metaphysics” is the mouthful of a title for Jason Robert Bell’s exhibition of painting and sculpture at Thomas Robertello Gallery. The small canvases that ring the room contain single totemic figures. The mythic protagonists are a techno-colored mishmash of cultural references including African masks, esoteric mysticism, art history, Disney, Willy Wonka and heavy metal. Encased beneath a layer of thick resin and depicted in otherworldly colors, the characters appear invulnerable. Usually alone in their foggy landscapes and adorned with flourishes of sparkling sand and metallic paint, the cavemen, fairies, cyclops or chimera are monumental despite their size. While the paintings themselves are alluring, the apparent invincibility of their characters and the perfection of the imagined world make it hard to relate to them beyond their superficial painted quality. This is most evident when comparing them to the nearby sculptures. While as totemic as the paintings, they are much smaller in scale, making them more toy-like than god-like. The painted paper and foamcore creatures fit in with Bell’s other creations but also recall Mexican and folk art traditions of sculpture. Bell’s work is an emblem of an information age where cultural symbols can be recombined at will into endless fantasyscapes that are only useful to the extent that they reflect our own terrain. (Dan Gunn)

Through February 21 at Thomas Robertello Gallery, 939 W. Randolph St.

RECOMMENDED

Continuing its celebration of Argentinean photography’s mordant sense of life, the gallery offers up the color photographic scenarios of Jorge Martin, who is partial to damsels in distress but is not above showing us a decrepit bathroom in which a sink filled with brackish water holds a plastic human head. Martin puts his models through their paces, having one of them lie sprawled on her back, dead on an ash heap; another walking blindfolded on a ledge in a filthy basement; and another kneeling in the woods holding up in front of her a flowered dress that is disposed in such a way that it appears as though it contains a headless child. The lady in the woods also gets a portrait in which she stares at us with a complex expression mingling sadness, bitterness and defiance; cry for me Argentina, if you dare. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 28 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

By Jason Foumberg

Artist Young Sun Han placed a Craigslist ad for a stranger to engage in a twenty-four-hour sustained hug. After receiving several responses, Young invited Gerald O. Heller to participate. Though not an artist himself, Gerald was comfortable with endurance practices, having run thirteen marathon races. The two men began their embrace on December 30 at midnight, and after moving through several emotional phases of excitement, physical fatigue and mental boredom (they agreed to remain silent), comfort, and finally, impatience, Young and Gerald released on December 31 as a crowd counted down the last seconds of 2008.

The world record for the longest embrace is twenty-four hours and one minute, a duration that could have easily been exceeded here, but that was not Young’s intention with his performance. Instead, he wished to heighten a hug’s normally fleeting physical sensation; even the most heartfelt hugs between mothers and sons last only a few seconds; even as we spoon with lovers, who we may have known for a lifetime or for one night, we must eventually push away. At which point does a hug or a handshake become uncomfortable or even taboo? Young wished to fight the internal stopwatch, commanded by cultural conventions, and invited the public to watch.

Since the performance, Young has returned to Auckland, New Zealand, where he is a permanent resident and has lived for the past two years. The Skokie-native runs an art gallery there, called City Art Rooms, a spacious white cube with large arching windows, with Kylie Sanderson, wherein they exhibit the work of emerging artists. While earning his art degree in Chicago, at the School of the Art Institute, Young worked on a project that also extended for twenty-four hours. He hit the streets of the city and engaged twenty-four strangers for one hour each, learning as much about them as a casual conversation would allow, and they about him. He then photographed them, and moved on. The idea of the stranger also figures in to his 2004–05 double-portrait series of couples that Young approached almost at random and photographed in their domestic settings.

Now, with the hugging performance, the complexities of intimacy are given full expression. At times Gerald, a tall 64-year-old Caucasian, felt like the contours of past lovers or even of the artist’s father, says Young, a twenty-something Korean-American. Also on view in the gallery space was a projection of a self-portrait. Here, Young has a red sheet over his head like a child’s ghost costume, with three holes ripped in it: two for eyes and one for his dick, protruding gloryhole-like. The photographic print could easily extend commentary on anonymous Internet sex sites, like Craigslist, where Young met Jerry, where identity is shrouded during a transaction of pleasure. The ghost looks strikingly like a Klan member, so that the gay ghost comes to represent the self-loathing and internalized shame inherent in some repressed homosexual desire. Too often, though, gay identity becomes over-sexualized, and is maintained as a simultaneous concealment and exposure; the public image of the sanitized and witty gay seems nothing like the haunting image of symbolic ancestors dead from disease.

In his artist statement, Young writes that art saved his life. In fact it gave him direction, and freedom. Perhaps to be sincere is uncool, said Young when I asked him about the sentimentality of his projects, which are refreshingly devoid of hip irony. Indeed, they are genuine endeavors. During the culmination of the hugging performance, onlookers engaged each other in a group hug.

Young Sun Han shows at Swimming Pool Project Space, 2858 W. Montrose, through January 31.

RECOMMENDED

The three photographers in this early and welcome effort to position art in an age of political and economic crisis deploy postmodern moves to shift our response from superficial realism to a deeper and more nuanced awareness of distress—an inward realism. Greg Stimac appropriates shots of seedy foreclosed houses from real estate flyers, prints them as grainy as can be to make them look even more forlorn, places them in a grid, and then puts a symbolic red diamond in the middle of his composition to suggest or maybe to scoff at a possible conspiracy behind the boulevard of broken dreams. Curtis Mann appropriates photos of conflict zones, fragments them and fills in the gaps with fiery reds and yellows to produce compositions that communicate the desolating excitement and searing beauty of violent antagonism. Lazarus went down to the banks of the river on a late, leafless autumn day, lay down and wrapped himself like a mummy in a tiger blanket, and shot the scene of ultimate abject camouflage. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 24 at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 835 W. Washington, (312)404-9188.

RECOMMENDED

The properties of flesh are the subject of Jim Lutes’ painting retrospective, spanning twenty-six years of the artist’s career. Given the broad range of work on view, we’re able to see various changes in Lutes’ renderings of skin, a veritable transmogrification of cells from squishy meat to wafer-thin crisps of light. Early paintings show a body extended beyond its means, so that a thick neck is blobular, as if throwing itself up. Later, the body piles itself into endless folds and is threaded with blues and greens—sickly colors, no doubt, but alive. Taking cues from Lucian Freud and Ivan Albright, Lutes sees the body as a contradictory thing of beautiful carnage. The latest paintings disperse the flesh’s substance into smoky or ghostlike auras, composed with thinly layered washes of egg yolk mixed with pigment, like steaming piles of the soul. Where did the body go? Look to other forms in the show, such as interiors with floating abstract swaths, for the answer. Paint moves dust mote-like upon the air as if propelled by some blunt spiritual spermatoza alongside dried skin flakes and other airborne waste. If you take a piece of thinly sliced meat and drape it over your eyes so that you can see through it—this is the surface of a Lutes painting circa 2006. Such viscera is no doubt called for here, but given the ethereal aspects also portrayed, one must concede that ritualistic upkeep of the body is the worship of an all-too-knowable god—the self. (Jason Foumberg)

Jim Lutes shows at The Renaissance Society, at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis, through February 15.

RECOMMENDED

In an expansive pre-election populist gesture and paean to diversity, performance artist Sheryl Oring and photographer Dhanraj Emanuel took to the American road and solicited ordinary folk to dictate messages to the next president that Oring rapped out on a manual typewriter, after which Emanuel took color head shots of the would-be advisors. The resulting 600 memos and photos appear in an elegant arc—like a rainbow—replete with visual and textual variety, ranging from high seriousness to low camp with nary a trace of irony or leg pulling. Del Ray Loven peers intently and determinedly into the camera; at the top of his agenda is getting the movie moguls to “restore all those old movies that are rotting in canisters.” With a smile counterpointed by sad eyes, Chelsea Ulloa writes: “Please don’t let my boyfriend get deployed.” Oring has stamped each message in red letters: Loven’s is labeled “IMPORTANT” and Ulloa’s “CONFIDENTIAL.” Vive la differance! (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 25 at the McCormick Freedom Museum, 445 N. Michigan. (312)222-4860.